There's a new writers'/artists' comm around, hausvilson. I was still half-asleep when I stumbled over it this morning and tried to join, thinking it was joining via application. It's by invitation, though. I'll be over there in the corner, beating myself on the head with a stick.

Of course, I'd love to be invited. Ego boost, plz ;). However, if they don't invite me (which is probable because a) well, I like my fiction, but the only story I ever got more than one page of comments on was the smutty Sunday fic Wilson's Balcony *gg* and b) I only post sporadically, and haven't posted any fiction in ages) I still think the comm is a great idea. house_wilson is a great comm, and it'll always be my favorite comm, but there are just too many people posting there to really take the time to look at each entry properly.

HOWEVER! (you knew there was one coming, didn't you *gg*):

This was in their introductory post:
In a few short weeks the community will host its first challenge: a month-long project designed to encourage members to produce something for each day of the month of August.

This made me wonder once again about one of my favorite issues I have with fandom. Why is an author only a good author if they can produce as much fiction as possible in an arbitrary time span? Take this challenge: one item per day; for a writer that means either 31 drabble-esque ficlets - sorry if this sounds incredibly bitchy, but don't we have more than enough of those already? - or a writer could write a longer fic and post a chapter a day. It's incredibly hard to keep up a rate like this (at least for me). Sometimes you just don't feel like writing. And if you do it anyway, what you produce is crap. So, if I wrote a 31 chapter fic in one month, I'd have a long fic, but parts of it would be incredibly crappy and would need tons of editing and rewriting - which are both annoying and frustrating activities.

I don't know. Challenges like that irk me. For me, they're too much about putting quantity over quality, and to be returning to the case at hand, wasn't that exactly what hausvilson was trying to avoid?